Ordinary people and their extraordinary pets

I've been reading the want ads lately for a bargain on a good dog. I've got the house, and a big, fenced yard. Time to get another dog. And stingily, I hope. I've been thinking about it.

My younger son has a Welsh Corgi I love to death. He is smart, beautiful, and just about the perfect middle-size dog I want. But he sheds incredibly, and I am not a woman given to mopping the wood floors every day (now there's an understatement). So probably not a Corgi. I still get all excited when I see Scotties, but I haven't seen ads for any. They aren't very smart, but they are fiesty, and you can't hurt their feelings and they are affectionate and very, very cute. But. Not another dachsund--I've got stairs. I'm looking. I'm looking.

Today I ran across another pet choice. To quote, "Hand tamed fancy rats. $8 adoption fee.3mos. old. Black/grey. For pets only, not snake food,pls. Very sweet/great pets.(Number followed.)"

I snickered. With all the universities around, a proscription on using them for lab testing might also be wise.

When I was a sophomore, I took an introductory psychology class, and we were required to do a lab experiment using rats. The professor brought in his daughter's brown rat named Friar Tuck. Friar Tuck was indeed a calm, nice-mannered rat, who ran up my professor's arm and kind of cuddled next to his neck. He insisted we all come up and practice lifting the amazingly patient rat up by the tail and set him on our hands, then lift him back. This was to prepare us for doing the same thing with much less attractive, much less socialized lab rats we would be using in a maze experiment that semester.

Desensitization, I think we call it.

I had no trouble performing the chore, setting him or her in the maze and recording the results. The problem was, to me one grey lab rat looked like another. Halfway through the experiment, I somehow started using the wrong rat. My error wasn't discovered until the testing period ended. To say my professor was not pleased would be to state the patently obvious. He didn't rip me to shreds, but for a few minutes he looked like he wanted to. My mistake had basically flawed the entire experiment for everyone. I had made all my lab sessions. I had written up my results. I had done well on all my tests. So with extreme restraint, he gave me a C for the semester instead of the F he probably wanted to award.

The next semester I took abnormal psychology. I really enjoyed it. No rats.
I have played with someone else's rat on a few occasions. I have never wanted to own one.

So I wish this rat owner well in providing happy homes for the rat babies. At least they smell better than ferrets. (Do pet snakes --isn't that an oxymoron?--eat ferrets, too? I thought folks mostly bought crickets and mice.)

I look for biases in my makeup and realize I am highly skewed as a pet owner towards dogs, then fish, then cats. I knew a family with an adorable pet chicken once, and the folks across the street have bunnies, and my niece once owned a corn snake for awhile. I've seen enough ferrets to know I wouldn't want one. Gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs? We had the guinea pig when my sons were young, and I'm still convinced I killed it by feeding it some banana. Pot bellied pigs? Parrots?

So. Did I say I was getting a dog? I'll stick with that.